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This page asserts that "Xcode 4 is a free download for all members of the iOS and Mac Developer Programs.", continuing "Sign in to your account to begin the download." and according to Apple, an account costs 99$/year.

Maybe I am missing something big here, for example "free" meaning "free" as in "free beer if you buy a subscription", but I have since suggested installing Debian. Proper package management makes it vastly easier to install and develop software.

People without easy access to compilers (I met a gal a few days ago who had old OS X and no 99$ to spare for a dev account) should still check out a track from the repository as wave file to get an impression of the style.

I wrote something similar to IBNIZ, yet vastly simpler, a composing software called glitched (needs pygame 1.9.1). The forth variant I use has no subroutines or recursion and is not even turing complete and the stack has only 256 fields. However, it is compatible with that of several other implementations (see README). Like IBNIZ, it has live editing and stack visualisation.

(Apologies in advance to the users of a totally unrelated glitch library, which is also written in python. I have met one of it's developers last night and we agreed insane troll logic dictates a merger of our two projects to rectify the namespace collision. I may have to bring that up again when he is sober.)

There is a project called Minetest-c55. It is not as featureful as Minecraft, but written in C++ (using Irrlicht) and licensed under the GPL2 (or – as I remember – at your option, any later version). You can check it out on Bitbucket.

Disclaimer: I maintain a fork called Minetest (Minetest Delta) with some added features (new block types etc.), which can be found on GitHub. Look at the screenshots.

Me too, I think the noise ratio is going up for at least a year. But then he is not at NASA anymore, so he probably does less math stuff. I think another problem is that honest criticism is not taken into account -- actually I asked Randall on IRC and he said that he fears getting obsessed with quality and prefers not worrying. While I see that this might be enjoyable, I think a little more thought couldn't be that damaging; just compare his approach to the Debian/OpenSSL disaster to my one to see what I mean.

erlehmann writes "On todays rally against internet censorship in Berlin, German long-term member of parliament Jörg Tauss announced he had quit the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and will support the Pirate Party in the upcoming elections (Twitter status, press statement, both in German). Tauss, Member of Parliament since 1994, is widely regarded as an internet expert and was one of only 4 politicians of the ruling coalition voting against the bill implementing secret lists of censored web content under the guise of fighting child porn, which has since become law.

Critics point to an ongoing investigation against Tauss regarding child porn, while he himself says he only purchased the pictures in question to prove that the internet is not a primary distribution channel and had hopes of blowing up a child porn ring. The Social Democratic Party has asked Tauss to resign from parliament after he quit the party."

erlehmann writes "This week, the two big German parties ruling Germany in a coalition have had the final talks on their proposed internet censorship scheme: Under the disguise of fighting child pornography, DNS queries for sites on a list shall be given fake-answers that lead to a site with a stop sign. The list itself is maintaned by the German federal police (Bundeskriminalamt).

German Blog Netzpolitik (literally "net politics"), details the history of the censorship plan and the protest movement that has formed over the course of several month. Over 128k citizens have signed a petition protesting the law, yet to no avail."

IMO, an "educated" opinion from a technical crowd is in any way better than a simple Google query. I don't know, for example, how Google could possibly have a differentiated answer to the pros and cons of particular clients.

Unless you are looking for massive scalability (as in: 500 users in a single chat room), Jabber / XMPP can handle everything better than IRC. There are things like automagic contact lists (have everyone in your department on the list, centrally administrated), working encryption, publish-subscribe... and of course the XMPP standard is easy to extend, as it's XML based.